Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Last year, I made some predictions on cloud computing. Here's my self-analysis:

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1. OpenStack continues to gain traction but many early adopters bypass Folsom in anticipation of Grizzly.>> Correct. This was a gimme.

2. Amazon's push to the enterprise means we will see more hosted, packaged apps from Microsoft, SAP and other large ISV's. Their IaaS/PaaS introductions will be lackluster compared to previous years.>> Correct. It's interesting that the press failed to notice the lack of interesting stuff coming out of AWS. Has the law of diminishing returns already hit Amazon?

3. BMC and CA will acquire their way into the cloud.>> Incorrect. CA picked up Nolio (and Layer 7), BMC acquired Partnerpedia. These acquisitions are pieces to the puzzle - but are not large enough to serve as anchors for a cloud portfolio.

4. SAP Hana will quickly determine that Teradata isn't their primary competitor as the rise of OSS solutions matures.>> Incorrect. SAP Hana continued to kick butt in 2013 and the buyers of it have probably never heard of the large open source databases. What was I thinking?

5. Data service layers (think Netflix/Cassandra) become common in large cloud deployments.>> Partially Correct. We're seeing the cloud-savvy companies implement cross-region data replication strategies - but the average enterprise is nowhere near this.

6. Rackspace, the "Open Cloud Company" continues to gain traction but users find more and more of their services 'not open'.>> Correct. Rackspace continues to push a 'partially open' agenda - but users seem to be more than happy with their strategy.

7. IBM goes another year without a cohesive cloud strategy.>> Correct. The acquisition of SoftLayer was a huge step forward in having a strategy - but from the outside looking in, they still look like a mess.

8. Puppet and Chef continue to grow presence but Cfengine gets a resurgence in mindshare.>> Partially Correct. Puppet and Chef did grow their presence, especially in the large enterprise. I could be wrong, but I personally didn't see Cfengine get traction. That said, Ansible and Salt came out strong.

9. Cloud Bees, Rightscale, Canonical, Inktank, Enstratus, Piston Cloud, PagerDuty, Nebula and Gigaspaces are all acquired.>> Incorrect. I was right about Enstratus but some of these predictions were stupid (like Canonical). The others remain strong candidates for acquisition.

13. PaaS solutions begin to look more and more like orchestration solutions with capabilities to leverages SDN, provisioned IOPS, IAM and autonomic features. Middleware vendors that don't offer open source solutions lose significant market share in cloud.>> Incorrect. I believe this is still coming but for the most part the vendors aren't there.

14. Microsoft's server-side OS refresh opens the door to more HyperV and private cloud.>> Unsure. This should have happened but I have no data.

15. Microsoft, Amazon and Google pull away from the pack in the public cloud while Dell, HP, AT&T and others grow their footprint but suffer growing pains (aka, outages).>> Correct. Well - at least the part where AWS, Azure and Google pull away from the pack. Dell continues to frustrate me; I need to have a sit-down with Michael Dell.

16. Netflix funds and spins out a cloud automation company.>> Incorrect. Perhaps this was wishful thinking. I'm a Netflix OSS fanboy - but think that they're starting to fall into the same trap as OpenStack (aka, open sourcing the kitchen sink without strong product/portfolio management).

17. Red Hat focuses on the basics, mainly integrating/extending existing product lines with a continued emphasis on OpenStack.>> Correct. Red Hat appears to be taking a risk averse strategy... slow but methodical movement.

18. Accenture remains largely absent from the cloud, leaving Capgemini and major off-shore companies to take the revenue lead.>> Unsure. I'm unaware of any large movements that Accenture made in the cloud. The big move in the SI space was CSC acquiring ServiceMesh.

19. EMC will continue to thrive: it's even easier to be sloppy with storage usage in the cloud and users realize it isn't 'all commodity hardware'.>> Correct. That said, we're starting to see companies implement multi-petabyte storage archival projects with cloud companies.

20. In 2013, we'll see another talent war. It won't be as bad as dot-com, but talent will be tight.>> Correct. And it will get worse in 2014.